It’s been a year since The Craft Off and Spinsters Emporium was launched and to celebrate a mob of artistic crafty people were invited to trade fresh creative ideas for prizes. The idea was to get into groups and to create art from the briefs given by the organisers, with live music from Ryan Lauder and Cecille Grey to get the creative juices flowing.
The first task of making original origami saw people making generic birds, cars and boats, which were all suspended from the ceiling, but the customised swan impressed the most.
After making a mountain of paper mess, Ryan Lauder took to the stage with his very own origami hat.
The Scottish acoustic-folk songwriter was joined by a couple of friends on the cello and double bass which provided the perfect chill-out sound for folding paper and creating even more mess!
Next on stage was the slightly eclectic Cecille Grey who clearly looked like they were having fun dancing away to their French pop songs.
The next task resulted in lots of gasps and confusion making us all think we had missed something historically important that day. The brief explained how the leaning tower of Pisa had collapsed and asked everyone to make a piece to emanate momentous buildings that would be missed if we never saw them again. Of course the next brief explained we had been stitched and that it was time to get our own back by creating an object that could cleverly fool people to think it was real.
The best bit was helping ourselves to whatever crafts took our fancy, from string to feathers to fabrics to empty bottles and it didn’t take long to clear the shelves.
After over an hour of clambering over paper and scissors on tiny tables the winners were soon announced.
The prizes went to groups who came up with the best pranks in visual form. One group made their own football table explaining that footballers would be made to play on the biggest football table in the world, due to the world cup taking place in brazil this year.
Another group told us that McDonalds would launch a left-handed burger priced £7.99 available until 7/7/77 and created the meal from fabrics. Even better the group snipped away at the LeftLion logo to incorporate it in their title!
The next prize was most surprising as it was my group that won! I can’t create artistic pieces to save my life which I think goes to show it’s worth taking part because you never know what you might win.
Our prank was that big corporations like Nike had chopped off Banksy's hand taking him off the creative pay roll and that we would never see a truthful piece of art from him again.
But the winner went to the group who made an amazing colourful castle and pretended that Nottingham Castle was the home of King George, which was even acted out with a sword in tow. One group even dramatised the landing on the moon dressed as astronauts.
Nottingham Craft Mafia and Spinsters Emporium proved crafty prizes galore including vouchers, haberdashery magazines, t-shirts, wallpaper and buttons.
The Malt Cross provided the perfect surrounding with chocolate sprinkled coffees and beer on offer and everyone took part to create something original. It was a great night had by all and had all our creative imaginations ticking away.
Kristi Genovese
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